RECORDING an album can be a difficult and time-consuming process, but the road to releasing The Departed's second album proved harder and longer than most.
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The project of Warrnambool multi-instrumentalist and producer Adam B Metal suffered a serious setback when burglars raided Metal's home in August last year.
Among the items stolen was his studio laptop which contained the almost-completed album.
"I was just about to start doing vocals the guitars, bass, lead parts and drums ... all that was done," Metal explained.
"The night (the burglary) happened I did a final listen through on the couch with the headphones and went 'yep, that's ready to do vocals'.
"I didn't back it up that's generally what I do at the start of a (recording) session, so if I'd started doing vocals the next day that's the first thing I would have done."
It took some time for Metal to get around to booting up his external hard drive to see how much he'd actually lost since he last backed-up the project.
"It was pretty heart-breaking to see what had to be redone," he conceded.
But it gave him "breathing space ... to just get over it". It also gave him time to formulate a plan of attack for completing The Departed II Metal turned to crowdfunding website Pozible in the hope of raising $2500 for a new studio laptop and production costs. That process proved to be about more than just money.
"You lose a lot of faith in humans after something like this happens," he said.
"Some of the things that got stolen, things like pieces of jewellery (my wife owned) have no sentimental value to anyone except to her, and it just makes you think 'people are shit'.
"I thought (with the Pozible campaign) we might get some pity pledges, maybe we'll get close (to $2500), we'll see how go, but the fact it ... happened pretty quickly and (the amount pledged rose) so fast in the first week made me think 'wow, people are still pretty cool'.
"And there were people pledging and posting supportive messages and that gives you hope and gets your mojo started up again. I definitely felt re-energised."
The whole situation, reflecting the positive and negative possibilities of people, even influenced the lyrics on the album, Metal said.
It also inadvertently changed the make-up of the album. To the half-finished versions of the 10 songs on the back-up hard drive Metal added two newly written tracks before whittling the final tracklisting of The Departed II down to nine songs.
"(On the upside) the songs that I wrote this year wouldn't have even been written," he said.
The end result is undoubtedly heavy, but Metal struggled to describe the sound, settling finally on "alt-metal".
"I barely even call (my music) metal these days. I mean, I know it is it's got double-kick and screaming and distorted guitars but calling it metal or heavy metal doesn't show what it is.
"I think it's more rock-based, just heavier than what most rock bands would do."
Metal described the album as "a bit more thought out" than the first Departed album, which came out in 2010.
He said "the first one was me figuring out what I wanted to do" in the aftermath of quitting as vocalist for prominent Aussie metal band Frankenbok, while the second album was "more focused" and contained a slightly different flavour courtesy of his live band contributing to a few songs.
While the majority of the album is performed by Metal, former member Tim Smock contributes drums to a couple of songs and live guitarist Marc Pigdon played on some tracks.
Bassist Bob Wake and Melbourne drummer Daniel Luttick round out the live band, which Metal hopes to take on the road early in the new year.
In the meantime, The Departed's second album will be available to download through bandcamp from tomorrow.